July 15, 2010

Snap-On 12 Outlet Power Strip

In our last shop we had two large power strips that we lived and died by. We had never had a power strip before and sort of looked down our noses at them. Not sure why. Anyhoo, we very quickly realized the benefits. Say you're deep into some project the requires a Dremel, an orbital sander, a jigsaw, and a table saw. You can set up a cat's cradle of extension cords and splitters and spend your time plugging and unplugging, or you have all the tool plugged directly into the workbench mounted power strip.

We also found that the power strip made it much easier to organize our tools while we were using them; if the Dremel is plugged in to the right of the orbital, when we put it down, we place it to the right of the orbital. It's not brain surgery, but it's just one of those little things that makes life a whisker easier.

We haven't equipped the new shop with any power strips yet, but when we do, we're going to consider the Snap-On. The main reason is that it's red and not that hideous office-park gray color like most other power strips. Secondly, we've never had any issue with any other Snap-On tools, so we wouldn't expect anything different from this one.

The Snap-On has a 15 amp breaker, a 6 foot cord, and it comes with mounting hardware.

I had my power strip for about 2 weeks in my hone workshop. I was using 2 De Walt battery chargers, and a Bosh random orbital sander when the power strip burst into flames at the cord end of the strip. I was glad that happened while I was in the shop to catch it.

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